SAGE Paris is pleased to present « Lucky Strike », the first solo show in Paris of Austrian artist, filmmaker and photographer Timotheus Tomicek. In his artistic work, Tomicek is known for his heterogeneous, cross-media approach. Since 2009, his work has been shown widely in international exhibitions as well as public and private collections. In a unique display conceived by the artist, mixing photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and video, « Lucky Strike » provides an intriguing presentation of his inspiring work.

“The swing swings. It swings into the nook of a ray of light, reflecting the light onto a painting, a portrait of a camera, illuminating the painting momentarily, but quickly passing its light on to a tray in the darkroom, thereby developing a photography. The photograph itself is already ambiguous, representation as well as reflection, autonomous, an independent statement, an endless token, a limitless symbol. “Tomorrow will see clouds and sunshine”. The fabric transforms the banality of a weather forecast into a multilayered plain of extensive validity. The photographic work depicting a flock of birds juxtaposed to the words "see you in a year" in a mirroring formation evokes a connection between space, time and return. The flock of birds and the text seem to distance themselves from one another, leaving the spectator in an emptiness that expands and fills itself with poetic melancholia.

Timotheus Tomicek lets the swing swing. In the gallery space, driven by an electric motor, the swing becomes a metaphor. Because in a metaphoric sense the swing cannot be stopped, its rhythm is random but constant. It is not the glimpse, which only just caught, cannot be grasped. It is the specific moments, which return persistently, as if following a primordial law, and are experienced each time in each encounter afresh, gaining complexity. They appear uncalled, in differing shapes and forms, acoustically or visually, a disappearing temporary freeze frame, fading but insistent, of sustained fleetingness.

These moments are animated by their former appearance and their relationships and references to themselves, to that which lives in our experience and to the unexpected context outside. In the combination of sometimes diffuse spheres, an extended, condensed space of experience emerges spontaneously, in which intellect and emotions are interwoven indistinguishably and in which memories, anticipations and the present fall together – only to throw us, by its very distinct principle of fleetingness, back onto ourselves again.”